Without support, animal advocates donate their time and money to save feline lives
The love for cats may be the main reason why independent rescuers dedicate themselves to the well-being of hundreds of animals abandoned on the streets. But beyond that, their care is also driven by a strong sense of responsibility. After all, feeding, neutering and treating illnesses are activities that require daily dedication.
It is not uncommon to hear stories of activists going into debt to save feline lives. The costs of rescues, medical treatments, neutering and food are just some of the challenges that every animal rescuer faces. Without public policies that support the animal welfare cause, activists must organize themselves into groups to handle the overwhelming demand.
Everything is done independently, without any institutional support. Even so, they spare no effort in helping these animals. To better understand the daily lives of these rescuers and inspire good actions, we share the stories of Alysson Ricardo, from SOS Pets in Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte and Ilka Westermeyer, from Gatinhos Pedra da Cebola in Vitória, Espírito Santo. They talk about how they started their journey as activists, how they care for the animals, and what can be done to support the cause. Check it out!
SOS Pets
“I am a history teacher, a veterinary medicine student and I have been continuously caring for animals since 2015. I started with small actions, like putting out food for the animals on my street. But since 2020, I have been working with animals on the west campus of the Universidade Federal Rural do Semi-Árido (UFERSA) (“Federal Rural University of the Semi-Arid – UFERSA”, in English). Due to the pandemic, the university was empty, and someone needed to take care of the animals that lived there.
SOS Pets was born from this initiative. It’s an independent project. We are not an NGO or anything like that. There has never been any public action within the university to address this issue. Even the veterinary medicine course does not embrace social responsibility. For example, there has never been an institutionalized care initiative from the university, like an extension project, for example.
I started by feeding the animals on campus during the pandemic, but I quickly realized the situation was worse than expected. We needed far more food than we had. The five kilograms of food that I and a few volunteers managed to gather were not enough. There were over 250 animals, and we needed at least eight kilograms of food per day!
Today, after a lot of work in neutering and adoption efforts, there are still around 180 animals, mostly cats, since they are very territorial. There are only about ten dogs. Every day, in the morning and afternoon, my four volunteers and I go to campus to feed them. That means 14 feeding tasks per week.
Our biggest concern is neutering, as it is the only way to control the reproduction of these animals. But we can only do it when someone donates, which is rare. Most of the time, we have to pay for it ourselves. It’s always a dilemma between feeding and neutering. We also promote adoptions, and over the years, we have managed to find homes for more than 250 animals. Last year alone, for example, we arranged 102 adoptions.
There is a high number of abandoned animals on the university campus, but abandonment is not the main reason for the excessive population. The biggest issue is uncontrolled reproduction. A single female cat can have up to six kittens per litter. If half of them are female, you can imagine how quickly the population grows… But the university does not provide neutering services or take any responsibility for the animals. We feed them, try to arrange neutering and then work to find them homes.
If we stopped taking care of them, the consequences would be huge. They would start reproducing again, leading to even more sick and starving animals, which would become a public health problem. Even so, the university does not support our work. They don’t even help promote our actions, nor do they take measures to prevent new cases of abandonment. There is no internal policy to raise awareness about animal welfare, nothing at all.
Currently, there is a municipal neutering program in Mossoró, but it is only for low-income people. The city has a partnership with a private clinic, but I cannot have the cats neutered there because I am a teacher and earn above the program’s income threshold. What frustrates me the most is the university’s complete lack of responsibility for the animals living on campus. It’s an enormous void of accountability.”
Story by Alysson Ricardo, history teacher, veterinary student and independent animal protector.
Gatinhos Pedra da Cebola
“I work in marketing. I’m German, married a Brazilian, and when I moved to Vitória, I joined a local group called Gatinhos Pedra da Cebola. But I’ve always had cats at home. When I was born, there were already cats in my house in Germany. So I’ve loved cats since my childhood.
The Pedra da Cebola group was founded in 2018. In the municipal park, there were many sick and injured cats. There must have been around 200 cats, and it was impossible to remove them from the park. Many were feral, meaning they couldn’t be put up for adoption because they weren’t socialized to live with humans. So the first thing the group decided to do was trap, neuter and return (TNR) the cats to the park.
I joined the group during the pandemic in 2020. By then, the group had already managed to neuter about 100 cats, but there were still 100 more left. The ones remaining were the most skittish, the ones who wouldn’t go into the trap cages, so I started focusing on that part. I bought a special trap, called a Drop Trap, and captured the rest. For some, I even had to use a net, like the ones used to catch alligators.
I must have paid, with my personal budget, around 100 neutering procedures over the three years I spent capturing these cats. Because if we don’t neuter them, the problem never ends. They will keep having kittens, and the cycle will continue. Thanks to this effort, we managed to stabilize the colony.
Today, all the cats in the park are neutered, except for the new ones that keep appearing, because unfortunately, people still abandon them. Now, I’m focusing on catching the newly abandoned ones to neuter them as soon as possible. Otherwise, the litters will start all over again.
After the neutering procedures, we noticed an amazing change. Before, there were many sick and underweight cats, suffering from sporotrichosis, mange, and other diseases. Nowadays, we no longer have those problems. We also provide daily food, and the cats have become healthier and chubbier, with better fur quality. So we can see that we’ve significantly improved their quality of life.
The male cats tend to become calmer, and when there’s an interested adopter, we remove them from the park and put them up for adoption. However, this still happens only occasionally, because most of the cats aren’t suited for adoption. When we find a pregnant female or very young kittens who wouldn’t survive alone, we rescue them, as well as very sick cats. In these cases, they go to private temporary shelters.
Our group has six women in the main core team, responsible for administrative decisions, veterinary visits, fundraising and organizing events such as fairs and bazaars to collect funds. Besides this core team, we have around 25 volunteers who help with various tasks like feeding and general care.
We struggle with debts. The Vitória city government has an Animal Welfare Program that helps us by covering neutering costs in partner clinics. Still, we have expenses with veterinarians, temporary shelters, medication and food, as we care for around 150 cats in the park.
For some reason, I have a talent for catching feral cats. Nowadays, I also trap cats in other areas of Vitória. The city government even calls me when they discover new colonies, because I’m the only person who can effectively capture these feral cats. I do all of this as a volunteer, but I also have a regular job, so it takes up a lot of my time.”
Story by Ilka Westermeyer, a micro-entrepreneur and independent animal protector.
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